The Winter Festival is one of Neverwinter’s big seasonal events that usually runs through the Christmas holidays and new year. The event takes players to the beautiful town of Twilight Tor where they can take part in different winter themed activities. You race for glory, drop gifts all over town, and skate-fight demons on a lake. It’s fun, and it’s not for nothing either, there are plenty of unique rewards to choose from! In case you are a bit overwhelmed with all the currency and items and want to know what you can realistically get, this guide is going to help.

Tutorial

Twilight Tor can be found on the overworld map and any character entering it for the first time can go through a set of tutorial quests in the zone. Start the event at your main contact Mayor Vario Cepheid next to the big main campfire and follow his lead. This can get a little repetitive if you’re doing it on many toons, so you only want to do them on your mains. All daily quests are instantly available so it’s luckily no requirement. You have to be level 15 though to be able to claim your daily Parcel.

Rewards and Currencies

The main activity to do each day is claiming your free Parcel form the ZEN market. Pick up the quest “Star Stuff” from Mayor Vario Cepheid and turn it in at the Giftmaster, which is located north-west of the main campfire, right at the race track. It gives you a voucher to claim one free gift. As stated in the tooltip, the more Parcels you open, the better the rewards (items can be looked up at the Giftmaster). The event runs for 22 days. Granted you do the Festival every day, you have at least two shots at a very nice reward per character at the end.

The Parcel is why you need to bring as many alts as possible to Twilight Tor. Claiming it, and your Star of Fortune, is a one-minute task and you are going to walk away from the Festival with useful stuff. The “ZEN Market Consumables” include Wards and Scroll of Mass Life for example, you’ll get more Retraining Tokens than you can use throughout the year, and some items from the higher reward tier sell for a nice amount of AD.

Usually it doesn’t stop with 22 Parcels though since you’ll additionally get a few Starlight Bags in gift groups (see below). These also add to the total of Parcels opened, but their contents are bound.

Gift Parties

Each opened Parcel always returns one Gift of Simril. When opened in a party, it will give the other members Lights of Simril, event refining points, and possibly a Star of Fortune or Starlight Bag. Throwing these gift groups is absolutely recommended. It’ll net you a nice amount of RPs and add to your count of Parcels. And depending on what you want, you can just buy rewards for the currency or flip your Stars for more gifts and Lights for more RP.

An annoyance throwing gift parties are scammers that pretend to have a gift but never share one. This seems to be especially bad during the first event days. Try to do this with friends or your guild if possible.

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You get one Star per day from the daily quest “Omens of the Stars” at Mayor Vario Cepheid. The Festival runs for 22 days, that’s 22 Stars. Although you occasionally get them from your gift parties as well, it’s still hard to get enough stars to buy all rewards. So you either have to decide between the Winter Sled (10), the Frost Mimic (18), the Frozen Throne of the North (14), and Royal Winter Sled (14), or pay for additional ones in the ZEN market (Bounty of Simril). The Mimic by the way is one of the options for players with alts to get a sellable item, but the companion is not much worth nowadays. The Royal Winter Sled in the meantime adds to the growing collection of purple mounts that you can get from events for just showing up daily.

Here comes the grind! After the initial 325 Lights from the tutorial quests, dailies only net you an abysmal seven more, “catapulting” the possible Lights from quests to 528. Even if you trade in all your Stars of Fortune for Lights (220 per) during the Festival’s Zenith (the last week of the event is called “Zenith”, in which all Lights are doubled), you probably can’t buy everything. The unique collectibles the store offers are 17,630 and you can buy Refinement and Blacklead Boxes to help with other projects as well. So these are rewards you have to work for.

Lights drop from Gifts, but the most effective way of farming them is the most boring one: fishing. It’s best to fish all day any day, score minimal points in any other event (Demons on Ice, Twilight Run) to snatch the 15 Lights there and come back to your hole asap. To be most efficient you need to craft a Sparkling Starlight Fishing Pole from the Simril Lightcrafting profession. It’s relatively easy and only requires you to do the activities for a bit. None of the items offer great reselling value however, simply because they’re dated.

Campaign Currency

Since 2016 fishing also nets campaign currency. You will randomly get special items like Treasure of Tiamat that you can trade in for Mod 1 to 5 campaign currency at the “Well-Traveled Stranger”. He is located on the terrace north of the main campfire. You can farm as much as you like and get most currency you need for the campaigns (not all though). I’m not sure this is really better than simply doing the dailies, but it’s certainly a nice additional incentive in case you’re fishing anyway.

The Flakes are used to craft the new Demon Sled and you need 200. You get at least four from the Demons on Ice event, two for Underdark Skirmishes and one from Heroic Encounters. Depending on what content you usually run on your mains, you might need to specifically farm for this. You can also buy a Crate of Blacklead for Lights of Simril or craft Blacklead in the Simril Lightcrafting profession.

The Artifact is another unique element in the Winter Festival. Like the Illusionist’s Mask it can be upgraded to epic with stuff earned from the event. The dailies hand out all the reagents for purple quality, you can however also buy additional Spirit of Simril from Stars of Fortune. If you’re on PC and already operating under the new refining system, you can upgrade the artifact with any refining points. On consoles you need to use the event RP until epic and progress normally after that.

Farm Advise

Now that you know all possible rewards, what’s actually worth going for? Well obviously it highly depends on what you like. Most items are cosmetic with little to no actual gameplay relevance. So if you like the looks, by all means go for those sleds and scarfs!

Main Characters

On your main characters that do not already have a purple mount you should however definitely not miss the Royal Winter Sled. This is a mount that you should be able to get within days. On top of the dailies you can also consider farming for campaign currency and RPs with Fishing. Since the refining system update the Winter Festival’s items are no longer limited to the event artifact. Fishing nets Lights of Simril, with which you can buy the Illuminated Box. Depending on what you normally do this might very well be a great source of RPs.

Farm and Alt Characters

You should bring all characters to the Winter Festival, even those that you do not actively play or only exist as invoke and inventory slaves. Since you normally don’t want any of the bound cosmetics, you can just go for gifts and RPs with them. Claim your daily stuff and throw gift parties, trade your Stars of Fortune for more gifts, and repeat. That way you maximize the Parcels you open and also amass a nice amount of refining points. Those are bound, but you can still move enchantments to the alt, refine and send them back. On console you can stash away the event RP until Mod 12b and then convert them.

I hope this will help you to figure out what you can get and want to get from the festival. In case you have any questions or additions, make sure to post them in the comments below or the corresponding thread on our message board. Happy holidays and see you at the telescope!

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j0Shi

j0Shi plays the Neverwinter MMORPG since the open BETA in 2013 and is a regular contributor to the blog and the whole UN:Project. Originally a Guardian Fighter inspired by the DPS builds of Envy and Rokuthy, he has built up ALTs of all classes and finished Module 5 with five characters in full legendaries and BiS/near-BiS level.

14 thoughts on “Winter Festival Guide”

Good article, it covers most of the bases. Don’t forget that you can also use stars to buy gifts of simril to use. In fact, the best use for the stars is probably buying gifts of simril because you can use them in to get startlight bags and increase your chances of getting past event items and zen market items.

I’d like to highlight that gift parties give out a nice amount of RP now that Lumens aren’t specific to the Beacon of Simril. I also suspect that they’ve replaced the enchants with Gemstones in the loot table and forgot to update the tooltip.

Regardless, out of a party of five people, each with six gift lanterns or so, I got 18k RP. Another bonus for gift parties. ^_^

You can probably spare those 14 stars for the mount, gift parties can go on for ages and give tons of stars. I did a gift party yesterday using only 6 stars (for gift lanterns) to start with and got 10+ back in return.

It hints at the fact that you can claim 22 gifts over the event days, and the best rewards start dropping after 20. So you have at least two (22 minus 20) shots at the highest reward tier on each character.

just got winter festival in chinese server, found a faster way to fish. when the loading bar runs to near end, walk/jump/cast to interrupt the process, it will save u 0.x secs each time. if u like gambling, u could try to interrupt earlier, at the risk of losing the fish. this acticle doesnt cover the Bait, which is better?